September 5 movie storyline. September 5 unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today. Set during the 1972 Munich Olympics, the film follows an American Sports broadcasting team that quickly adapted from sports reporting to live coverage of the Israeli athletes taken hostage.
Through this lens, September 5 provides a powerful new perspective on the live broadcast seen globally by an estimated one billion people at the time. At the heart of the story is Geoff, a young and ambitious producer striving to prove himself to his boss, the legendary TV executive Roone Arledge. Together with Marianne, a German interpreter, Geoff unexpectedly takes the helm of the live coverage. As narratives shift, time ticks away, and conflicting rumors spread, with the hostages’ lives hanging in the balance, Geoff grapples with tough decisions while confronting his own moral compass. How do you cover a situation like this if what the perpetrators want is the spotlight you give?
September 5 is a 2024 historical drama film co-written and directed by Tim Fehlbaum. The film recounts the 1972 Munich Olympic hostage crisis from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew and their coverage of the events. The film had its world premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on 29 August 2024, and is scheduled to be released in select theaters on November 29, 2024 before expanding on December 13, by Paramount Pictures.
The film makes extensive use of archival footage from ABC’s coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympics and the hostage crisis. Fehlbaum and his team spent months researching the events, and worked with a production design team to create an authentic replica of the broadcasting facility used by ABC Sports on that day.
The film premiered on August 29, 2024, as the opening film at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti Extra section. A few days before being announced as part of the Venice slate, Paramount Pictures’ Republic Pictures acquired worldwide sales rights outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland to the film. Following an overwhelmingly positive response at Venice and Telluride, Paramount decided it was best to keep the film with them, with the main studio opting to officially acquire distribution rights.
Originally scheduling it for a wide release on November 27, 2024, Paramount later pivoted to a limited theatrical release on November 29, expanding wide two weeks later on December. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Toronto International Film Festival rejected the film “ostensibly because it might generate controversy related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, despite screening the documentary Russians at War, whose portrayal of the Russian invasion of Ukraine “did result in protests of such a scale that the fest ended up pulling the film.
About the Story
Flawlessly blending tons of archival footage from September 5, 1972 — a day that now lives in infamy for those who were alive at the time — with uncanny recreations of the ABC crew working overtime, and then some, to get it all on the air, the film focuses on the key players who fought to make it happen.
They include Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the relentless ABC executive in charge of broadcasting the ’72 Munich games; Marvin (Ben Chaplin), the team’s smart and testy head of operations; Marianne (Leonie Benesch), a local German translator; and Geoff (John Magaro), a young producer meant to cover an uneventful day of boxing and volleyball, who winds up landing on something much more significant.
Things start off ordinarly enough, with a sleepy TV crew settling in for their shift after a day which saw Mark Spitz famously take home a gold medal in swimming, But then gunshots are heard at the Olympic Village, which is just a few blocks away from ABC’s temporary headquarters. Geoff, who’s been left in charge while the higher-ups take a much-needed day off, soon finds himself doing everything he can to both figure out what’s happening and report it live to viewers back in America.
With the help of Marianne, who goes from being a neglected backroom interpreter to a major field reporter, Geoff and his team quickly realize that a pivotal and possibly world-changing event is under way: Palestinian terrorists, belonging to a group known as Black September, have killed two Israeli athletes and taken nearly a dozen others hostage, asking for the release of hundreds of prisoners in return.
This is all happening, of course, in Germany, at a time when the country was starting to publicly come to terms with the horrors inflicted on Jews during WWII. That history is not easily forgotten by Geoff and the others — especially Marvin, who’s the son of Holocaust victims and holds a major grudge against the Germans he comes into contact with.
September 5 (2024)
Directed by: Tim Fehlbaum
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem, Corey Johnson, Georgina Rich, Benjamin Walker, Corey Johnson, Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Adeosun
Screenplay by: Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, Alex David
Production Design by: Julian R. Wagner
Cinematography by: Markus Förderer
Film Editing by: Hansjörg Weißbrich
Costume Design by: Leonie Zykan
Art Direction by: Marco Böhm
Music by: Lorenz Dangel
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Constantin Film (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), Paramount Pictures (International)
Release Date: August 29, 2024 (Venice), November 29, 2024 (United States)
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